Marooned! (12 page)

“My kind of people,” Roger whispered. “The daring, dashing, brainless kind!”

Sean took a deep breath. “Most of them know there’s not likely to be much on Earth to return to.”

“Any word on the launch?” Jenny asked.

“
Argosy
is already cleared to leave orbit. Planet
command has just turned nav and command control over to the ship’s crew.”

“What if this is a trick?” asked Mickey Goldberg, his voice suspicious. “They may be trying to fake us out.”

Sean shook his head before he realized that Mickey couldn’t see him in the dark. “I don’t think they realize we can tap into their net. If we didn’t know what was going on, there’d be no point to a trick.”

“They’re about to launch!” Nickie said, her voice surprisingly loud in the darkness, edged with her excitement. “They can’t turn back now. Less than a minute to go—”

Light flooded the compartment, cutting Nickie short, blinding them all.

“Here you are.”

Sean shivered, not from the cold. Dr. Ellman had found them.

And he sounded far from happy.

The twenty young people of the
Doe Crew stood miserably together, warmer than they had been in days but even more uncomfortable. The common area outside the Administration offices was hardly large enough for them to squeeze into, and with Dr. Ellman, Lieutenant Mpondo, and Dr. Simak glaring at them, the space seemed even smaller.

“You have caused us a great deal of trouble,” Dr. Simak said, pacing as much as she could—two steps forward, two back.

Alex nudged Sean. “I wondered where you’d picked up that pacing habit,” he whispered.

“You will be silent!” Behind Dr. Simak, Ellman could hardly contain his anger. His face was so red it was almost glowing. “What punishment do you recommend this time,
Doctor
Simak?” he demanded, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “It has to be more than confinement to quarters!”

Mpondo said mildly, “I don’t think we can shoot them.”

Dr. Simak closed her eyes. “Please! I’m tired and this is no time for bickering. Yes, Dr. Ellman, their punishment will be more severe than confinement to quarters. It will be confinement to the planet.”

Ellman spluttered.

Dr. Simak raised a hand. “I didn’t want these young people to face the uncertainty and danger that we have all agreed to face. However, that decision is now out of my hands.” Looking directly at Sean, she continued. “We’ve heard from the L5 outposts and from the lunar colony. They have all agreed to hang on. There are fewer than ten thousand colonists in space, everything counted—space stations, lunar colony, and us. We’re going to survive for as long as it takes. Reports from Earth are not encouraging. At best, it will be one year—one Martian year, mind you—until the
Magellan
rescue ship can hope to launch from lunar orbit to return to Mars. Then it will be months until it could possibly arrive here.
And even then—well, you know how limited that ship’s capacity is. Like it or not, we’re stranded here for the foreseeable future. I don’t know how long it will take Earth to recover from this collapse, but until that time, our mission is simply to survive as best we can.”

Mpondo added somberly, “The odds are against us. Unless we can tap new sources, we’ll use up our water supply in a matter of months, even with full recycling. We have to protect our power generating facilities at all costs, or else we’ll freeze to death. Food is marginal. If everything holds together, the greenhouses should barely provide for us. But one crop failure means we starve. We have no reserves, and we can’t expect resupply from Earth.”

“We know that,” Sean blurted.

“And we don’t care,” added Jenny, stepping up to stand beside him. “It’s our decision. We’re going to stay.”

“You will work,” warned Mpondo. “We have to survive at all costs. That means no free rides. You’ll
all work harder than you ever have in your lives. You will continue your education, but you’ll also have to pull a shift, just like every other colonist.”

“That’s fine,” Sean said, his chin up. “We didn’t expect anything else.”

“Very well,” Dr. Simak said. “Sean, you stay for a moment. The rest of you are dismissed. Get some food and some rest. You’re going to need it.”

“You can say anything to us that you’re going to say to Sean,” Mickey objected. “We’re all in this together.”

“I know that,” Dr. Simak responded resignedly. “But Sean is in my foster care, and the rest of you are not. You’re dismissed.”

They filed out quietly, with Mpondo and Ellman the last to go. Sean met Ellman’s glare as the heavyset man looked back over his shoulder. His sour expression promised that Sean in particular was going to have a hard time in the future.

“Come into my office, Sean,” Amanda said at last. She pulled her chair from behind her desk and
motioned Sean into the visitor’s chair. She sat facing him, reached out, and took both of his hands in hers. “How did you know this was coming?” she asked.

Sean blinked. “The collapse on Earth?”

“You’ve talked about this before. You seemed to know it was coming even when the leaders on Earth were saying things were looking up. What told you that this disaster was about to happen?” Amanda stared intently into his eyes.

With a shrug, Sean said, “That’s my only talent, I think. I can guess at trends and outcomes better than most people. For over two years now, I’ve been feeling that something drastic was going to happen on Earth, but I didn’t know just what. That’s why I wanted to be here.” He paused and then added, “And I wanted to stay with you.”

“Why did you talk the others into staying?”

“I didn’t,” Sean said. “When they found out I didn’t plan to go back to Earth, they all decided to stay too. I didn’t talk them into anything.” He struggled for words. “This is more than a prank.
Look, the Asimov kids are all orphans. We don’t have anything on Earth to return to. Marsport is our future, our hope of building something, maybe even of giving the human race a chance of surviving. I still don’t know what’s going to happen on Earth, whether it will pull through or….” He shrugged again.

“None of us knows,” Amanda said quietly. She sighed. “This is going to be very difficult for you and your friends, more difficult than anything you’ve ever done. I’m counting on you.”

“On me?” Sean asked, surprised.

Amanda’s expression was kind. “You do have talents, Sean, more than being able to assess probabilities. Maybe you didn’t talk your friends into staying on Mars, but they stayed because of you. That’s a talent. It’s called leadership.”

“I’m not a—”

“You are,” she said simply. “The others feel it, even if they don’t put it into words. Believe me, Sean, leadership is a tough job. Responsibility comes
with it, and that can crush anyone who isn’t prepared. If the others find the next months hard, you’re going to find them all but impossible. We’re living in a little pocket that human engineering has made habitable, but the rest of this planet will kill you.”

Sean gave her a quizzical smile. “I know,” he said. “Mars has a million ways of killing us. But that means we have to get very, very good at staying alive.”

“Well put,” said Dr. Simak dryly. “Now let’s see if we can do that.”

Sean nodded. His sense of doom, the sense that had so driven him when he was on Earth, had lifted. An odd kind of hope had replaced it—a hope colored with uncertainty, even a little fear. He didn’t know what would happen now; maybe his feeling of impending catastrophe had even been a fluke. Maybe his cautious sense of optimism was wrong, and maybe disaster was waiting next week, or next month, or next season.
Maybe none of the Marsport colonists would get out of this alive.

Still, whatever happened, he was home.

And at the moment that made up for everything else.

Look for the second book in the MARS YEAR ONE trilogy

Missing!

Landslides, a deadly climate, and the increasingly unpredictable weather of Mars make survival nearly impossible, but the most immediate problem facing the Marsport colonists is the dwindling water supply. The group decides to construct an automated station in a rift valley where ice accumulated from the atmosphere will be melted and moved through warming pipelines to Marsport.

The kids of the Asimov Project participate in the work, but then a fierce storm hits and a team that includes Jenny is isolated and lost. Despite orders not to leave Marsport, Sean puts together a group of kids to go out and find the team. As the race to save the missing colonists becomes increasingly dangerous—and pits Sean against Amanda
and
the administration of the colony—Sean quickly learns that schisms within the social order are almost as deadly as Mars itself.

FALL 2004

M
ARS HAS A MILLION DIFFERENT WAYS TO KILL YOU
….

The year is 2085. Mars Experimental Station One, a colony built to test humans’ ability to live in an alien and hostile environment, has been in existence for ten years. This functioning city of two thousand people includes only twenty teenagers, each hand selected from the billions on Earth as part of the controversial Asimov Project.

The Asimov teens each have reasons to doubt themselves and distrust each other. But one thing is certain: Mars offers them something Earth never could. When the existence of Marsport is threatened, the group must overcome their fears and join forces, for their survival depends on nothing less.

F
OLLOW THE ADVENTURES OF THESE TEENS IN THE
M
ARS
Y
EAR
O
NE TRILOGY
:

#1 M
AROONED
!

#2 M
ISSING
!

#3 M
ARSQUAKE
!

A
LADDIN
P
APERBACKS

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
C
HILDREN’S
D
IVISION

Bobby Pendragon is a seemingly normal fourteen-year-old boy. He has a family, a home, and a possible new girlfriend. But something happens to Bobby that changes his life forever.

HE IS CHOSEN TO DETERMINE THE COURSE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE.

Pulled away from the comfort of his family and suburban home, Bobby is launched into the middle of an immense, inter-dimensional conflict involving racial tensions, threatened ecosystems, and more. It’s a journey of danger and discovery for Bobby, and his success or failure will do nothing less than determine the fate of the world….

PENDRAGON

A new series by D. J. MacHale

Book One: The Merchant of Death

Available now